There’s a reason so many digital transformation projects stall out: companies confuse having data with being able to use it.
After attending the recent B2B Connect Summit in San Diego, one theme was unavoidable across every session, keynote, and panel: organizational misalignment is killing productivity, customer experience, and AI progress. And it’s not just the usual suspects. Misalignment isn’t limited to manufacturers and distributors. It shows up between sales and marketing, IT and business units, even within marketing itself.
Silos Aren’t Just Technical—They’re Cultural
One panelist cited a Forrester study that found nearly 60% of marketing content goes unused by sales teams. The reason? It doesn’t match how sales talks to customers. That’s not a tooling issue. That’s two teams working from different assumptions and incentives.
We also heard about mid-sized companies struggling to coordinate product data across departments because "nobody owns the full journey." Everyone's optimizing for their own slice of the funnel. The result? Friction at every stage.
Fragmentation = Frustration
Lenovo's marketing leader told a story that should be a wake-up call. Despite spending a mid-seven-figure budget on marketing, effectiveness was declining. The culprit? Fragmentation. Disconnected campaigns, incomplete feedback loops, and siloed analytics.
Their solution wasn’t more tech. It was a radical realignment: marketing now owns the entire customer journey from acquisition through retention. Only by consolidating responsibilities could they begin to extract meaningful behavioral insights and drive coordinated improvements.
Findability Is the Bottleneck
If there was a Seth Earley drinking game, the phrase "There is no AI without IA" would be the first rule. But it’s more than a catchphrase.
Multiple presenters stressed that their biggest barrier to using AI wasn't lack of data, it was lack of structure. Data locked in emails, PDFs, and legacy systems isn’t useful to a chatbot or generative search tool. Without metadata, taxonomy, and governance, even the best LLM can’t retrieve the right answer.
One session pointed out that only 6% of companies are currently using chatbots that synthesize multiple data sources. Why? Because the rest don't have their information architecture in place to support it.
AI Doesn’t Wait for Perfect Data and Neither Should You
In a particularly candid moment, an audience member asked, "When is the data good enough to start using AI?" The panelist’s response was blunt: "That’s a cop-out. The data is never perfect. You start now, and fix as you go."
This mindset, build the plane while flying it, was echoed across several talks. Companies that waited for perfect data hygiene were years behind. The leaders were the ones tackling real problems with real users, while maturing their data foundations in parallel.
Collaboration Is the Competitive Advantage
The standout performers weren’t the ones with the most advanced tech. They were the ones with the best cross-functional alignment.
One fireside chat highlighted a company that had doubled revenue for three years straight, not by investing in more systems, but by aligning their ERP, ecommerce, and customer service teams around a single source of truth. No middleware. No duplicative tools. Just shared access to the same structured data.
This is the real promise of digital transformation: not just more data, but more usable, findable, actionable knowledge across the organization.
Final Thought
If organizations want to scale AI, personalization, or self-service, they can’t afford to let silos persist. The road to intelligent systems starts with cultural alignment and ends with findability.
Because the truth is simple: If your teams can’t find the data, your systems can’t use it. And neither can your customers.